For the whale point, am I fairly interpreting your argument as saying that mammals are more similar, and more fundamentally similar, to each other, than swimmy-things? If so, consider a thought experiment. Swimmy-things are like each other because of convergent evolution. Presumably millions of years ago, the day after the separation of the whale and land-mammal lineages, proto-whales and proto-landmammals were extremely similar, and proto-whales and proto-fish were extremely dissimilar. Letâs say in 99% of ways, whales were more like landmammals, and in 1% of ways, they were more like fish. Some convergent evolution takes place, we get to the present, and youâre claiming that modern whales are still more like landmammals than fishâI have no interest in disputing that claim, letâs say theyâre more like landmammals in 85% of ways, and fish in 15% of ways. Now fast-forward into the future, after a billion more years of convergent evolution, and imagine that whales have evolved to their new niche so well that they are more like fish in 99% of ways, and more like mammals in only 1% of ways. Are you still going to insist that blood is thicker than water and we need to judge them by their phylogenetic group, even though this gives almost no useful information and itâs almost always better to judge them by their environmental affinities?
(I donât think this is an absurd hypotheticalâI think âcrabsâ are in this situation right now)
And if not, at some point in the future, do they go from being obviously-mammals-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this to obviously-fish-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this in the space of a single day? Or might there be a very long period when they are more like mammals in some way, more like fish in others, and youâre allowed to categorize them however you want based on which is more useful for you? If the latter, what makes you think weâre not in that period right now?
Are you still going to insist that blood is thicker than water and we need to judge them by their phylogenetic group, even though this gives almost no useful information and itâs almost always better to judge them by their environmental affinities?
No, of course not: we want categories that give useful information.
Did I fail as a writer by reaching for the cutesy title? (I guess I canât say I wasnât warned.) The actual text of the postâif you actually read all of the sentences in the post instead of just glancing at the title and skimmingâis pretty explicit that Iâm not proposing that phylogenetics is of fundamental philosophical importance (âitâs not that weâve âdecidedâ that we âwantâ to define animal words based on phylogenyâ [...] âweâre likely to end up talking about phylogenetics as a [mere] convenienceâ), and Iâm not saying no one should ever want to talk about convergent-evolution categories (âtrees, and possibly crabs, are a case in pointâ).
Rather, the reason I wrote this post is because I keep running into idiocies of the form âBut who cares about evolutionary relatedness; I only care if it swimsâ (on the âAre dolphins fish?â question) or âBut who cares about sex chromosomes; I only care about presentation and preferred pronounsâ (on the âAre trans women women?â question). And Iâm pointing out that even if genetics isnât immediately visible or salient if you glance at an organism from a distance, genetics being at the root of the causal graph buys you lots and lots of conditional independence assertions. (And if you donât know what conditional independence is and why it matters, then you have no business having positions about the philosophy of language. Read the Sequences.)
In the process of writing this up, I succumbed to the temptation of running with the proverbial title as a catchy concept-handle, but I would have hoped the audience of this website was sophisticated enough to understand that it was just a catchy concept-handle for the âroot of the causal graph, means more conditional independence assertions, means the clustering happens in a much higher-dimensional spaceâ thing, and not some kind of deranged assertion that âBlood Is Infinitely Thicker Than Waterâ or âBlood Is Thicker Than Water In All Possible Worlds, Including Thought Experiments Where Evolution Works Differently.â
And if not, at some point in the future, do they go from being obviously-mammals-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this to obviously-fish-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this in the space of a single day?
No, of course not. Like many Less Wrong readers, I, too, am familiar with the Sorites paradox.
Or might there be a very long period when they are more like mammals in some way, more like fish in others, and youâre allowed to categorize them however you want based on which is more useful for you?
You should categorize them whichever way is more useful for making predictions and decisions in whatever context youâre operating in.
Suppose we have three vectors in ten-dimensional space, u = [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], v = [1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], ad w = [3, 3, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]. A rich language with lots of vocabulary for describing the world will probably want both a word for a category that groups u and v together (because they match on x1 through x3), and a word for a category that groups u and w together (because they match on x4 through x10).
Youâll probably end up talking about {u, w} more often than {u, v} because the former cluster is in a âthickerâ, higher-dimensional subspace, and itâs not always obvious exactly which variables are ârelevant.â If I own the animal appearing in the photo located at the URL https://ââcommons.wikimedia.org/ââwiki/ââFile:A_white_cat.jpg, and you ask if I have a pet, Iâm probably going to say âYes, I have a catâ, rather than âYes, I have a white-animalâ or âYes, I have an endothermâ, even though the latter two statments are both true and itâs good to have language for them. I think this kind of thing is why English ended up allocating a short codeword bird to a category that includes penguins and excludes bats, even though sparrows and bats have something very salient in common (flying) that penguins donât.
All this is utterly trivial for people who are actually trying to communicateâwho want to be clear about what which probabilistic model theyâre trying to point to. But I think itâs important to articulate the underlying principles rather than saying âyouâre allowed to categorize them however you wantâ, because sometimes people donât want to be clear: suppose someone were to say âDolphins are fish because if they werenât, then I would be very sad and might kill myself. You ought to accept an unexpected acquatic mammal or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered fish if itâll save someoneâs life; thereâs no rule of rationality saying that you shouldnât, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should.â
This emotional-blackmail maneuver is obviously a very different kind of thing than straightforwardly saying âDolphins are fish in the second sense, but not the first sense; itâs important to disambiguate which sense you mean when itâs not clear from context.â If some intellectually dishonest coward were to try to pass off the emotional-blackmail attempt as a serious philosophy argument, they would be laughed out of the room. Right?
This is a good post, but it doesnât seem very consistent with the part of the Body Keeps the Score review that I was picking on? In response to people who say that âdepressionâ probably isnât one thing, you reply that those research programs havenât panned out. That makes sense: if you donât know how to find a more precise model, a simple model that probably conflates some things might be the best you can do.
But thatâs an empirical point about what we (donât) know about âdepressionâ, not a philosophical one. Iâm saying the APAâs verdict on van der Kolkâs âdevelopmental trauma disorderâ proposal should follow the same methodology as your reasoning about depression. If theyâre not persuaded by van der Kolkâs evidence as a matter of science, fine; if van der Kolkâs evidence doesnât matter because âthatâs not the kind of thing we build our categories aroundâ as a matter of philosophy, thatâs insane.
I think âcrabsâ are in this situation right now
What reading or experience is this based off of? This sounds more like something someone would say if theyâve only heard the term âcarcinisationâ as a fun fact on the internet, rather than actually reading the Wikipedia page in detail.
For the âI would be sad for those boundariesâ I think there is reason not to naively just obey it but its not as hopeless as âbeing laughed out of the roomâ.
I want to differentiate two different layers of this problem: A difference in what is a natural category to a person and how to manage and choose a shared meaning system.
I previously used a analogy of berries which are chemically different but morhpologically very similar, ie they have nearly the same color but they are metabolically different. Then say there is a small fraction of humans that have a lot of trouble digesting one variant and very easy time with the other variant while most other humans have equally easy peasy time with all variants.
Now I want to evoke an analogy of nut allergy. If you have a nut allergy you really really want for packaging to contain information if there are nuts in the product or whether there is possibility of traces. One could also imagine a human that did not infact have a nut allergy but just disliked the taste of nuts. Both groups would be for lessening the amounts of nuts used in cooking and both groups would be for labeling products that do use nuts so they could not consume them.
Someone could be âallergy scepticalâ and think people that advocate for nutlabels are all or mostly people who just really dislike nut flavour. Then the âproof of the existence of allergiesâ would be to specify how nuts entering cause harm beyond mild annoyance and symptoms like death. And in a âtypicalâ human this allergy and harm is not present.
A nut allergic person forced to navigate a world that doesnât support nut detection would be genuinely dangerous. If they have anxiety or fear about it that would be justified by the structure of their existence.
A claim of sadness from a particular concept could be likened to a report of how an allergic persons immune responds has different properties. Or of a claim how racistic institutions or behaviours cause elevated cortisol levels. To say that high cortisols levels are a âyou problemâ points to the direction of that the proper reaction against hostility would be calmness rather than stress. So with those words it could also read to not be blackmail but just informing of the (likely) consequences.
Where it would go full blackmail is if the primary effect is to have the desired societal policy in place and we fabricate the required story to get it passed. A nut-disliker might want to upsell their unpleasantness that they get. There is a the danger that if they lie âit would kill meâ than people could disbelieve genuine allergics reports.
So I think the âbut me sadâ argument is at its weakest on whether or not there are laws of rationality that are in fact violated. Feelings donât have any specific âfree passâ to be freely chosen and like fear or anxiety can be improperly paranoic or proper threat detection the feeling of sadness should be based. For dolphins I would need to genuinely ask âwhat do you mean makes you sad?â, I would guess that the nut case could be established (and a nut-disliker would need to lie) althought the detail level as a non-allergic person is a bit fuzzy to me. For the controversial area it is likey that it is hard to estalish what happens and via what mechanism and there is a lot of trusting the word and understanding of different parties (chemists and biologists donât have much disagreement about the properties of nuts or human guts).
As a non-allergic person I should not be annoyed that my food is filled with annoying and senseless-to-me food information. And arguing that senseless-to-me would be a very good basis for senseless-for-food-packaging. It is a different issues whether we for example consider dogs to be food consumers and include them in our circle of care when making labeling decisions (âbut it wasnât labeled toxic for dogs!â is not a valid excuse atleast in this point in time). What happens in the âgeneral caseâ can be very relative.
>âBut who cares about sex chromosomes; I only care about presentation and preferred pronounsâ (on the âAre trans women women?â question)
So, like, depending on context, this might be that, say, you brought up some question for which chromosome-women is the obviously relevant concept, and then someone else tried to stop you from using âwomenâ to mean chromosome-women. Which would be a fault of theirs. Or it might be that someone was trying to, say, work out how to treat people in ways that are good for them, and then you tried to stop them from using âwomenâ to mean, the cluster of social practices around treating women as opposed to men. Which would perhaps be a fault of yours, or at least, Iâd want to know why you were doing that, e.g., because you thought the linguistic territory shouldnât be somehow ceded.
âDolphins are fish because if they werenât, then I would be very sad and might kill myself. You ought to accept an unexpected acquatic mammal or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered fish if itâll save someoneâs life; thereâs no rule of rationality saying that you shouldnât, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should.â
So, insofar as the category âfishâ was supposed to be about animal biology and not social practice, this is of course antirational. But, say itâs the case that if dolphins are fish, then I would be very sad and might kill myself. This isnât purely about animal biology, it also involves my values, and so almost certainly involves other facts, e.g. how I and others will relate to tr⌠dolphins. Just like convergent evolution somehow âoverlaysâ or âoverlapsâ phylogenetic descent, as a usefully-separately-conceived causal/âexplanatory factor, so too might these (additional, non-biological, partly social) concepts about dolphins overlay the (also useful, biological) concepts about dolphins.
Even taking everything else you write here for granted (which I wouldnât normally, but letâs go with it for now)⌠the question in your last sentence seems easy to answer: weâre not in that period right now, because right now, by construction, whales are more landmammals in 85% of ways, so if you classify them as mammals, and then use that to make predictions about heretofore-unobserved traits, you will be right 85 /â 15 = ~5.67 times more often than if you had classified them as fish.
Iâve tried to address your point about psychiatry in particular at https://ââslatestarcodex.com/ââ2019/ââ12/ââ04/ââsymptom-condition-cause/ââ
For the whale point, am I fairly interpreting your argument as saying that mammals are more similar, and more fundamentally similar, to each other, than swimmy-things? If so, consider a thought experiment. Swimmy-things are like each other because of convergent evolution. Presumably millions of years ago, the day after the separation of the whale and land-mammal lineages, proto-whales and proto-landmammals were extremely similar, and proto-whales and proto-fish were extremely dissimilar. Letâs say in 99% of ways, whales were more like landmammals, and in 1% of ways, they were more like fish. Some convergent evolution takes place, we get to the present, and youâre claiming that modern whales are still more like landmammals than fishâI have no interest in disputing that claim, letâs say theyâre more like landmammals in 85% of ways, and fish in 15% of ways. Now fast-forward into the future, after a billion more years of convergent evolution, and imagine that whales have evolved to their new niche so well that they are more like fish in 99% of ways, and more like mammals in only 1% of ways. Are you still going to insist that blood is thicker than water and we need to judge them by their phylogenetic group, even though this gives almost no useful information and itâs almost always better to judge them by their environmental affinities?
(I donât think this is an absurd hypotheticalâI think âcrabsâ are in this situation right now)
And if not, at some point in the future, do they go from being obviously-mammals-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this to obviously-fish-you-are-not-allowed-to-argue-this in the space of a single day? Or might there be a very long period when they are more like mammals in some way, more like fish in others, and youâre allowed to categorize them however you want based on which is more useful for you? If the latter, what makes you think weâre not in that period right now?
No, of course not: we want categories that give useful information.
Did I fail as a writer by reaching for the cutesy title? (I guess I canât say I wasnât warned.) The actual text of the postâif you actually read all of the sentences in the post instead of just glancing at the title and skimmingâis pretty explicit that Iâm not proposing that phylogenetics is of fundamental philosophical importance (âitâs not that weâve âdecidedâ that we âwantâ to define animal words based on phylogenyâ [...] âweâre likely to end up talking about phylogenetics as a [mere] convenienceâ), and Iâm not saying no one should ever want to talk about convergent-evolution categories (âtrees, and possibly crabs, are a case in pointâ).
Rather, the reason I wrote this post is because I keep running into idiocies of the form âBut who cares about evolutionary relatedness; I only care if it swimsâ (on the âAre dolphins fish?â question) or âBut who cares about sex chromosomes; I only care about presentation and preferred pronounsâ (on the âAre trans women women?â question). And Iâm pointing out that even if genetics isnât immediately visible or salient if you glance at an organism from a distance, genetics being at the root of the causal graph buys you lots and lots of conditional independence assertions. (And if you donât know what conditional independence is and why it matters, then you have no business having positions about the philosophy of language. Read the Sequences.)
In the process of writing this up, I succumbed to the temptation of running with the proverbial title as a catchy concept-handle, but I would have hoped the audience of this website was sophisticated enough to understand that it was just a catchy concept-handle for the âroot of the causal graph, means more conditional independence assertions, means the clustering happens in a much higher-dimensional spaceâ thing, and not some kind of deranged assertion that âBlood Is Infinitely Thicker Than Waterâ or âBlood Is Thicker Than Water In All Possible Worlds, Including Thought Experiments Where Evolution Works Differently.â
No, of course not. Like many Less Wrong readers, I, too, am familiar with the Sorites paradox.
You should categorize them whichever way is more useful for making predictions and decisions in whatever context youâre operating in.
I donât want to summarize this as âhowever you wantâ, because the question of which categories are most useful for making decisions and predictions is something people can be wrong about, and moreover, something people can be motivatedly wrong about, andâas weâve seenâthe general laws governing which categories are useful is something people can be motivatedly wrong about.
Suppose we have three vectors in ten-dimensional space, u = [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], v = [1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2], ad w = [3, 3, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]. A rich language with lots of vocabulary for describing the world will probably want both a word for a category that groups u and v together (because they match on x1 through x3), and a word for a category that groups u and w together (because they match on x4 through x10).
Youâll probably end up talking about {u, w} more often than {u, v} because the former cluster is in a âthickerâ, higher-dimensional subspace, and itâs not always obvious exactly which variables are ârelevant.â If I own the animal appearing in the photo located at the URL https://ââcommons.wikimedia.org/ââwiki/ââFile:A_white_cat.jpg, and you ask if I have a pet, Iâm probably going to say âYes, I have a catâ, rather than âYes, I have a white-animalâ or âYes, I have an endothermâ, even though the latter two statments are both true and itâs good to have language for them. I think this kind of thing is why English ended up allocating a short codeword bird to a category that includes penguins and excludes bats, even though sparrows and bats have something very salient in common (flying) that penguins donât.
Unfortunately, sometimes the same word/âsymbol ends up getting attached to two different categoriesâthatâs why dictionaries have a list of numbered definitions for a word. Dolphins arenât fish(1) (cold blooded water-dwelling vertebrate with fins and gills), but they are fish(2) (water-dwelling animals more generally). Bananas arenât berries in the culinary sense, but they are berries in the botantical sense. Obviously, it would be retarded to get in a fight over bananas âare berriesâ: it depends on what you mean by the word, and which meaning is relevant can usually be deduced from whether weâre baking a pie or studying biology, and if itâs not clear which meaning is intended, you can say something like âOh, sorry, I meant the botanical senseâ to clarify.
All this is utterly trivial for people who are actually trying to communicateâwho want to be clear about what which probabilistic model theyâre trying to point to. But I think itâs important to articulate the underlying principles rather than saying âyouâre allowed to categorize them however you wantâ, because sometimes people donât want to be clear: suppose someone were to say âDolphins are fish because if they werenât, then I would be very sad and might kill myself. You ought to accept an unexpected acquatic mammal or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered fish if itâll save someoneâs life; thereâs no rule of rationality saying that you shouldnât, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should.â
This emotional-blackmail maneuver is obviously a very different kind of thing than straightforwardly saying âDolphins are fish in the second sense, but not the first sense; itâs important to disambiguate which sense you mean when itâs not clear from context.â If some intellectually dishonest coward were to try to pass off the emotional-blackmail attempt as a serious philosophy argument, they would be laughed out of the room. Right?
This is a good post, but it doesnât seem very consistent with the part of the Body Keeps the Score review that I was picking on? In response to people who say that âdepressionâ probably isnât one thing, you reply that those research programs havenât panned out. That makes sense: if you donât know how to find a more precise model, a simple model that probably conflates some things might be the best you can do.
But thatâs an empirical point about what we (donât) know about âdepressionâ, not a philosophical one. Iâm saying the APAâs verdict on van der Kolkâs âdevelopmental trauma disorderâ proposal should follow the same methodology as your reasoning about depression. If theyâre not persuaded by van der Kolkâs evidence as a matter of science, fine; if van der Kolkâs evidence doesnât matter because âthatâs not the kind of thing we build our categories aroundâ as a matter of philosophy, thatâs insane.
What reading or experience is this based off of? This sounds more like something someone would say if theyâve only heard the term âcarcinisationâ as a fun fact on the internet, rather than actually reading the Wikipedia page in detail.
For the âI would be sad for those boundariesâ I think there is reason not to naively just obey it but its not as hopeless as âbeing laughed out of the roomâ.
I want to differentiate two different layers of this problem: A difference in what is a natural category to a person and how to manage and choose a shared meaning system.
I previously used a analogy of berries which are chemically different but morhpologically very similar, ie they have nearly the same color but they are metabolically different. Then say there is a small fraction of humans that have a lot of trouble digesting one variant and very easy time with the other variant while most other humans have equally easy peasy time with all variants.
Now I want to evoke an analogy of nut allergy. If you have a nut allergy you really really want for packaging to contain information if there are nuts in the product or whether there is possibility of traces. One could also imagine a human that did not infact have a nut allergy but just disliked the taste of nuts. Both groups would be for lessening the amounts of nuts used in cooking and both groups would be for labeling products that do use nuts so they could not consume them.
Someone could be âallergy scepticalâ and think people that advocate for nutlabels are all or mostly people who just really dislike nut flavour. Then the âproof of the existence of allergiesâ would be to specify how nuts entering cause harm beyond mild annoyance and symptoms like death. And in a âtypicalâ human this allergy and harm is not present.
A nut allergic person forced to navigate a world that doesnât support nut detection would be genuinely dangerous. If they have anxiety or fear about it that would be justified by the structure of their existence.
A claim of sadness from a particular concept could be likened to a report of how an allergic persons immune responds has different properties. Or of a claim how racistic institutions or behaviours cause elevated cortisol levels. To say that high cortisols levels are a âyou problemâ points to the direction of that the proper reaction against hostility would be calmness rather than stress. So with those words it could also read to not be blackmail but just informing of the (likely) consequences.
Where it would go full blackmail is if the primary effect is to have the desired societal policy in place and we fabricate the required story to get it passed. A nut-disliker might want to upsell their unpleasantness that they get. There is a the danger that if they lie âit would kill meâ than people could disbelieve genuine allergics reports.
So I think the âbut me sadâ argument is at its weakest on whether or not there are laws of rationality that are in fact violated. Feelings donât have any specific âfree passâ to be freely chosen and like fear or anxiety can be improperly paranoic or proper threat detection the feeling of sadness should be based. For dolphins I would need to genuinely ask âwhat do you mean makes you sad?â, I would guess that the nut case could be established (and a nut-disliker would need to lie) althought the detail level as a non-allergic person is a bit fuzzy to me. For the controversial area it is likey that it is hard to estalish what happens and via what mechanism and there is a lot of trusting the word and understanding of different parties (chemists and biologists donât have much disagreement about the properties of nuts or human guts).
As a non-allergic person I should not be annoyed that my food is filled with annoying and senseless-to-me food information. And arguing that senseless-to-me would be a very good basis for senseless-for-food-packaging. It is a different issues whether we for example consider dogs to be food consumers and include them in our circle of care when making labeling decisions (âbut it wasnât labeled toxic for dogs!â is not a valid excuse atleast in this point in time). What happens in the âgeneral caseâ can be very relative.
>âBut who cares about sex chromosomes; I only care about presentation and preferred pronounsâ (on the âAre trans women women?â question)
So, like, depending on context, this might be that, say, you brought up some question for which chromosome-women is the obviously relevant concept, and then someone else tried to stop you from using âwomenâ to mean chromosome-women. Which would be a fault of theirs. Or it might be that someone was trying to, say, work out how to treat people in ways that are good for them, and then you tried to stop them from using âwomenâ to mean, the cluster of social practices around treating women as opposed to men. Which would perhaps be a fault of yours, or at least, Iâd want to know why you were doing that, e.g., because you thought the linguistic territory shouldnât be somehow ceded.
Thanks for your patience. Iâll take this in the containment thread.
So, insofar as the category âfishâ was supposed to be about animal biology and not social practice, this is of course antirational. But, say itâs the case that if dolphins are fish, then I would be very sad and might kill myself. This isnât purely about animal biology, it also involves my values, and so almost certainly involves other facts, e.g. how I and others will relate to tr⌠dolphins. Just like convergent evolution somehow âoverlaysâ or âoverlapsâ phylogenetic descent, as a usefully-separately-conceived causal/âexplanatory factor, so too might these (additional, non-biological, partly social) concepts about dolphins overlay the (also useful, biological) concepts about dolphins.
Even taking everything else you write here for granted (which I wouldnât normally, but letâs go with it for now)⌠the question in your last sentence seems easy to answer: weâre not in that period right now, because right now, by construction, whales are more landmammals in 85% of ways, so if you classify them as mammals, and then use that to make predictions about heretofore-unobserved traits, you will be right 85 /â 15 = ~5.67 times more often than if you had classified them as fish.